


If All We Had Was Each Other

by Phoenixflames12



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-07-08 03:10:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19862542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoenixflames12/pseuds/Phoenixflames12
Summary: Post Episode XXXVIIIAgainst all the odds, Jack returns to Anne in Philadelphia and together they begin the slow journey towards recovery and reconciliation.





	If All We Had Was Each Other

**Author's Note:**

> After watching the Season 4 finale and Jack and Anne's reunion scene on repeat, this story wormed its' way into my head and refused to let me go until it had all been written. 
> 
> Inspired by this music video by Rackhamish 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai5YCTEqzrs

She had not been prepared for the bitter cold of the Philadelphia winter.

After the sun soaked, salt stained heat of Nassau that had sunk itself into her bones and swept into her blood, the frigid, icy chill that blows off the docks and makes her tug her shawl tighter about her shoulders is as alien as another world.

A world where Jack was dead at the hands of Captain Flint and Woodes Rogers and she, who had followed him since she had been little more than a child of thirteen, alone and vulnerable in a place where she had no right to be.

‘Watch yourself!’ A man in a Puritan’s sombre coat and a wide brimmed hat pulled low over his face, pewter buckles on his shoes and a leather money bag tied to his belt shoves past her and the hawkers and small, barefoot boys who seemed to appear from nowhere cried out for work in the cold.

In the distance, the masts of the merchant’s ships stand out like black spikes against the hard, grey sky.

Watching him vanish into a crowd of many, her fingers itch at the thought of getting themselves around the heavy, supple leather.

That part of her life Is over now.

Jack had seen to that.

Jack had picked her up from the gutter of her shame. Had scooped her-broken and bruised and bloodied- from a marriage that she had been forced into by a father who had then disowned her, casting her out from under him as if she were worse than nothing.

Jack had watched her back, shielding her from the roving eyes and straying hands of the tavern goers, teaching her how to bind her breasts and lower her voice as they had threaded their way through Charlestown and then towards the beacon of hope that was Nassau.

She had watched his in return, quick with a knife and quicker still with her words in finding spies to further support for their cause, a fire haired thief in the night, a phoenix with a homing instinct for the one to whom she owed her life.

Looking out over the street, her breath billows out in cold clouds, her lungs still aching against in healing bone. They are a melee of people whose lives she does not know, whose actions will not influence her own and yet each one seems to wear Jack’s face.

The flash of a silk scarf catching in the weak, white sun that barely rose above the horizon.

A glimpse of an unruly dark crop of hair, the skim of sideburns against a lean, high cheekbones.

In desperation, she tries to hold onto each one as they pass her by, but they each seem to melt away like the half remembered, half forgotten sweetness of snow melting on her tongue as a small child in the grounds of the Kinsale estate.

Gooseflesh that has nothing to do with the cold ripples up her arms. It catches her breath, making her bury further into the warmth of the quilt that she had snatched from the bedchamber.

‘ _Where are you going?’_

_Idelle’s dark eyes had been narrow with reproach when Anne had passed her in the kitchen._

_‘Nowhere.’_

_‘Really.’_

_She had barely spared the girl’s look of deep exasperation a second glance, keeping her head down and focussing on moving towards the back door, step by painful step._

_‘The doctor and Mistress Guthrie said that you shouldn’t be on your feet for another week. Do you really think that’s wise?’_

_‘Fuck what they think.’ The words had been sharp and bitter in her mouth, but it had felt good to say them, to hear them snap out in the close, dark confines of the kitchen._

And now, standing in the icy cold, she wonders if Idelle was right.

Wonders whether Jack’s impossible luck will have run out at last and she is alone in the world, nursing the ghosts of his final kiss against her broken face as they sat on the quay in the grey, cold light of dawn.

_‘I do it for us. That’s how it started. That’s how it’s going to end.’_

‘Are you goin’ to move or what, missus?’

A sharp -tongued shop boy with a brown cloth cap and thin legs that stick out like mottled poles from his trousers jostles past her, but she barely notices.

And then, coming round through the alley that snakes its’ way behind the apothecary, she catches sight of him.

Or at least she thinks it’s him, weaving his way through the crowd like a ghost, Featherstone just behind him.

He seems thinner, taller somehow, the faded blue jacket hanging off his shoulders. His eyes are the same though, dark and sharp and hungry in the cold, grey light.

She moves through the crowd like a sleepwalker, the bodies that bar her from him melting away like water running off the road.

_Jack._

His name is a spike to her heart, a wordless promise for all the things that she has longed for in the lonely, sleepless nights that she has spent since his departure from the dock.

Time slows down as they come together, the last few yards seeming to last an eternity.

His eyes widen for a fraction of a second at the sight of her and suddenly she is in his embrace, the shawl enveloping them both. His breath is hitched with cold, the firm rise and fall of his chest grounding her to him as he draws her close, his sideburns rasping against her cheek, the soft fall of his hair pressed against her ear.

‘It’s over, Anne,’ she hears him murmur, his voice no more than a whisper, as if he doesn’t truly believe it himself. ‘It’s over.’

* * *

Somehow, they make it back to the house.

One of Mrs Guthrie’s servants, a tall girl with a set face and mistrusting dark eyes has been hovering by the front door which had been left ajar and now runs forward with a lamp, making to take Anne’s arm, but Jack shrugs her off with a silent, steely glare.

They have been through too much, seen too much to be separated now, even if it is only for a moment.

The light from the girl’s lamp washes over unknown paintings of horses, dogs, men, land as they move through the hallway and up the silent staircases towards the guest bedchambers but Anne hardly takes them in. If Idelle and Max hear them at all, they have no notion of it.

All she can think about is Jack’s weight pressed into hers, the stabs of pain in her still healing ribs.

The room is soft with the dying heat of an old fire that still smoulders in the grate. The bed has been made up since Anne last left it and now looks crisp and alien in the cold, clear light.

‘Shall I bring water to wash in, mistress?’

_Mistress._

_The word sounds so alien to her ears, so refined and poised and speaking of everything that her life has been up this moment has forced her to forget._

The girl’s voice is a quiet, sullen question, her gaze pointedly fixed on Jack, swaying on his feet.

His face is as white as bone as he sucks in a breath and lets it out in a long, slow hiss of silent pain, dark eyes searching for Anne.

‘Yes. Do.’

His voice still holds that same sharp charm that made those on the street sit up and listen and for that she’s grateful.

They listen to the girl shut the door with a thud and the clatter of low heeled shoes against the dark wood of the stairs that soon fade away into nothingness.

Outside the window, the light is fading, the shadows lengthening into long, black streaks of darkness against the walls.

The girl had left the window ajar when she had come into the room and through it, somewhere below them, a door slams and they hear the murmured chorus of Idelle, Max and Featherstone’s voices carrying in on the wind.

Slowly, they limp towards the bed, sinking onto it with a groan of rusted springs. The weight of the days’ exertion tugging at the corners of Anne’s mind like a great, irresistible blanket and she grits her teeth, trying to think past the pain, trying to stay awake.

‘You all right?’

Jack’s question brings her back with a start, his hand reaching for hers across the coverlet, calloused fingers tracing the rusted red of the scars left by the shards of glass that had ripped her palms to ribbons.

When she doesn’t answer, he reaches for her hand, cradling her scarred palms within his own, slowly bringing their clasped hands to his lips.

She finds herself swallowing thickly at the sight of their joined hands, choking back a sudden rush of bile at the memory of those deft fingers rising with painful slowness through the wreckage of Woodes Roger’s carriage, of the weight of his hands as they had cradled her head in the darkness of the _Walrus’s_ hold.

‘Yeah,’ she murmurs, keeping her gaze on their hands, her voice not sounding her own.

A dark, sceptical look flies across his face, settling deep within his eyes as he reaches to trace the line of her cheek. 

‘No, you’re not. Come back.’

She tries to smile for him, but the action feels forced, false and stops before it’s truly begun.

He raises an eyebrow at that and shakes his head softly, the grip on her cheek tightening ever so slightly.

She breathes out, the breath pained and shaken and lifts her face to meet his.

His gaze has lost the hard wildness that it worn so often in Nassau and now holds a softness that she had thought had been lost for good. 

For a brief moment, she sees the ghost of the man who had stood in a tavern in Charlestown and had slit her husbands’ throat with a flash of silver marring into a ribbon of scarlet lifeblood.

The ghost of the man who had held out his hand to her as she had trembled under the table in a dress that had been ripped down the middle, exposing her and her shame to the world.

A waif of a girl who had clutched an empty tankard as a weapon and accepted the man’s hand as he told her that he would look her after now and that she was not to be frightened.

From outside the chamber door, she hears the clatter of the girls’ feet on the landing, the slosh of water against a porcelain bowl. A knock at the door and Jack reaches across the bed to press a soft, chaste kiss against her forehead.

The girl comes in quickly, her eyes dark and sullen under her cap as she places the bowl and some cloths on the table next to the bed. She bobs an imitation of a curtsy that Jack snorts at, not bothering to hide her raised eyebrows and flees, leaving them finally, blissfully, alone.

* * *

They wash each other with shaking strokes that slowly become stronger. Somehow, in the passage of time since the girl had left, he had managed to undress her and remove his shirt and trousers- their clothes puddled in a heap by the bed.

Jack’s nose is buried in Anne’s scalp, the weight of his chest pressed up against her bloodied palms, the heat of it reminding her tired and fragile brain over and over that he is alive.

He is safe.

She pulls the cloth roughly against his chest, watching rivers of the world’s filth flow from his chest.

A contented sigh ripples from the very base of his being as she presses a kiss against his heart, his hand reaching up to take the cloth from her, tenderly passing over the lugs of her ears, scooping her hair off her neck to wash the old, faded scars that litter her back, the swoop of her cheekbones.

She can feel her eyes growing heavier with every pass of the cloth, her aching heart soothed into slumber by the steady rhythm of his heart against her ear, the slosh of water against the bowl, the murmur of Jack’s voice descending into incomprehensible sweet nothings.

Outside, the light is fading, the shadows lengthening against the window.

Jack pulls her closer onto the bed, curling his arm around her shoulders.

She relaxes into the touch, relishing in the solid weight of him.

His touch is home, the only proper home that she has ever known and the thought that she had come so close to losing him burns thickly in her throat, the pain of tears that she does not want to shed suddenly choking her.

‘It’s all right,’ Jack’s voice is a murmur, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, bringing her back from a place that she did not realise that she’d been.

‘Is it?’

The question is thick in her throat, full of a sudden childish fear that she cannot rid herself of.

He answers her with a kiss, one that taste of salt and cold and home all at once.

‘Jesus, Anne,’ he murmurs, his voice a husky catch in the silence.

‘D’you think I’d have it any other way?’

* * *

_**Fin** _

**Author's Note:**

> Please feel free to read and review!
> 
> Comments, suggestions, questions, constructive criticisms etc are like chocolate to my brain!
> 
> Much love and enjoy x


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